Earlier this week I was in Paris to join particle physicists from around the world at the International Conference on High-Energy Physics, ICHEP 2010. This conference series began in 1950 as the ‘Rochester series’, named for the original venue in the US, and its meetings rapidly became the place to present the latest results and discoveries.
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French diplomat François de Rose was one of CERN’s founding fathers. Shortly after the end of World War II, on a diplomatic posting in the United States, he made the acquaintance of several leading physicists who, like him, were sitting on the Atomic Energy Commission, a body set up by the fledgling United Nations. He became friends with Robert Oppenheimer and met Isidor Rabi and the Frenchmen Lew Kowarski, Pierre Auger and Francis Perrin, all physicists driven by the conviction that developing fundamental research infrastructure was one of the keys to rebuilding Europe.
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TOTEM, one of the smaller experiments at the LHC, has recently recorded the first candidates of proton-proton elastic scattering at a collision energy of 7 TeV. Studying the elastic scattering between two protons is a powerful way of exploring the inner structure of the proton, one of the most common, yet still poorly understood, particles we observe in Nature.
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LHCf, one of the three smaller experiments at the LHC, has completed its first run. The detectors were removed last week and the analysis of data is continuing. The first results will be ready by the end of the year.
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Laboratories like CERN can routinely produce many different types of antiparticles. In 1995, the PS210 experiment formed the first antihydrogen atoms and a few years later, in 2002, ATRAP and ATHENA were already able to produce several thousand of them. However, no experiment in the world has succeeded in ‘trapping’ these anti-atoms in order to study them. This is the goal of the ALPHA experiment, which has recently managed to cool down the antiprotons to just a few Kelvin. This represents a major step towards trapping the anti-atom, thus opening a new avenue into the investigation of antimatter properties.
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As every year, the summer months see the arrival at CERN of summer students. Over a seven-week period beginning on the first Tuesday in June, students arrive at CERN for stays that will last from 8 to 13 weeks. This means that some of them are already coming to the end of their stay.
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Courtney Williams, a 19-year old British student, is passionate about physics. She has just spent a week at CERN, from 12 to 16 July, a prize she won for a project on neutrinos in the framework of the European Union Contest for Young Scientists (EUCYS) held in September 2009.
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Accelerator experts are no strangers to innovative optimizations of existing techniques and to the development of novel solutions. Sometimes, they even come up with ideas that have the potential to revolutionize the field. This is the case with the Tolerance Aligned Cantilever Mounting (TACM) system, a completely new way of supporting the drift tubes, one of the core elements of linear accelerators. The new, patent-pending technique will be implemented at Linac4.
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Science and technology labs are the ideal places for developing innovative solutions. However, inventors sometimes don’t realize that their ideas can find an application in industry, which can in turn have a technical and economic impact on society. Some researchers may think that disclosing an invention is a time-consuming process which is worth doing only in very special cases. But one thing is certain: it is always worth informing the Knowledge and Technology Transfer group, as they will give you the correct advice and support. Don’t be afraid of the paperwork… it can be highly rewarding!
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